Dalloway
In Dalloway, Yann Gozlan paints a cold, unsettling portrait of a near future where human creativity and algorithmic oversight converge within the pristine confines of a smart building. It’s a fable-like story that echoes JG Ballard’s High-Rise (1975), though Gozlan’s vision trades brutalist concrete for the sleek, sanitised architecture of Silicon Valley.
Clarissa (Cécile de France), a once-celebrated YA novelist, is accepted into a creative residency set within a minimalist, high-tech complex that feels more like a lifestyle start-up HQ than a traditional artist’s retreat. The communal areas are oppressively open, full of hard lines and silent, echoing surfaces. It’s the kind of aesthetic that aims for transparency but delivers detachment: polished concrete, glass partitions, neutral tones. Her suite is no less sterile – no clutter, no history, just Dalloway (Mylène Farmer), the AI virtual assistant presiding over the space.
The environment becomes an apt mirror for Clarissa’s mental fog as she struggles to write about Virginia Woolf’s final days. De France is compelling, capturing a fraught mix of paranoia, grief and writer’s block that sustains the film’s tense atmosphere. The omnipresent voice of Dalloway, provided by singer Mylène Farmer, is chillingly calm – part therapist, part warden. Lars Mikkelsen, on the other hand, feels like an overly on-the-nose casting choice for Mathias, a fellow resident whose character leans heavily on the actor’s established screen persona. Brooding, wine-sipping and prone to cryptic pronouncements delivered in a gravelly murmur, Mathias is the kind of shadowy figure we’ve seen countless times – rendered with all the usual mannerisms but offering nothing fresh.
Still, beneath its familiar imagery and character tropes, the film gestures toward broader concerns. Gozlan touches on timely themes – data mining, corporate surveillance and the uneasy divide between replication and true creativity – but never explores them with real depth. In the end, Dalloway captures the dystopian logic of a world shaped by Big Tech’s insidious reach, but rather than breaking new ground, it settles into a sleek, ambient cautionary tale that feels all too familiar.
Christina Yang
Dalloway does not have a release date yet.
Read more reviews from our Cannes Film Festival coverage here.
For further information about the event visit the Cannes Film Festival website here.
Watch the trailer for Dalloway here:
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